Animation is starting to slow down a little for me in the last days (if animation is cranked this close to the end then you’ve got problems).
So other than a tweak or two here and there, there isn’t much for an animator to do. So yesterday Kjartan made me this little guy.

With a quick rig and flap cycle, I’m spending the last hours pigeon’ing any scene I can. Sticking him perched in a tower somewhere in the background, or flying past in the distance just to add a little touch of movement and, eh-hem… life.

In all seriousness these characters should be 3d printed to raise revenue for the Blender Foundation… or even made available in the shapeways store for people to print themselves. They’d make great collectibles!

I would be interested to see renderfarm stats this week. Is there anyway you can post a cpu-hours stat for all the rendering? Or maybe, a graph of frames in the queue over time for the week?

And that said, how long does it take with Blender Institute facilities to re-render the whole film? IF you’re adding pigeons today, even if you’re smart about render layers, doesn’t that mean that you have to re-render large portions of the film?